January 13, 2007

I’m going to be moving over to my personal website to do my blogging from here on out. This site will be left “as is” so anything you need from here isn’t going anywhere. I certainly hope you’ll follow. It’s just one sub-folder away from the one this blog sits in so it’s not far. Meet me over there and I’ll tell you about Dino and me hanging out last night. So update your bookmarks and I’ll see you there.

December 28, 2006

I’ve been on a nostalgia kick lately so I’ve been scouring my various hard drives finding music that I’d forgotten I had. Here’s are a few things I’ve come across.

This first thing is probably the most bizarre piece of music I’ve ever written. It was the very first demo I did for Christopher Gustave’s Six Comforts project. When Chris asked me to write some music for this thing I had an idea that we were going to do some super-over-the-top-just-how-weird-can-we-make-it sort of thing. Chris was not as amused with this piece as I was. After that I got a little better grip of the direction he had in mind. The quality of this recording is pretty lousy but it makes me laugh every time I hear it. It gets a tad repetitive in the middle but it’s only 2 minutes long so stick with it, the end is worth the wait. Any fans of Dr. Demento will appreciate what I was going for here.

This second piece actually ended up on the Six Comforts album as background music for a thing Chris and I put together called “Pardon My French”…I think. This makes me laugh too. I love this song. Again – a bit repetitive but it needed to be that way for our purpose.

The third mp3 is a compilation of the cover songs we did at The Drew Johnson Band CD release party. I forgot that we did so many. Each song is edited down to keep this thing from being a half hour long. I gotta say my guitar tone was totally killer that night. It makes me wish I had my Matchless back. This is just a recording straight from the sound board so it doesn’t sound that great and you can’t hear Steve hardly at all but it’s still worth a listen. I’m probably breaking some kind of law by posting these songs. Hope not.

The last thing is a video of The Drew Johnson Band playing some more cover tunes at practice. I have no idea what I intended to do with this other than maybe to see exactly how fat I look playing other people’s songs. Once again these songs have been edited for length. The first few seconds of this are Dino showing off his guitar chops to Steve.

December 21, 2006

After a visit to the guitar emergency room it looks like my guitar is going to survive. So to all of you who have already emptied your bank accounts to mail me a check in the hope that I would just go ahead and buy that vintage Martin guitar so I don’t fall off my blinding pace of releasing an album every five years, thank you. I’ll only be needing about one hundred bucks of it but I’ll be sure and post the pictures of me vacationing in Hawaii.

December 8, 2006

Here is an mp3 of Twenty Miles from Waterloo. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that this is one of three songs that were never finished for the album. Kristopher Curtis has been a big advocate of this song and was a major influence in the push to have it be one of the final ten so I figure I at least owe it to him to post it and let everybody hear how far we got. I spent a few hours one evening getting it mixed just enough to see if there were enough elements there for it to work. There aren’t. However, the drumming on this tune is so stellar that it really needs to be heard.

Here are the reasons I don’t consider it finished. There were a bunch of keyboards in the verses that we never got tracked. The lead vocal doesn’t exactly give me chills. The big, fuzzed out guitars in the chorus are too fuzzed out. I was so impressed that a vintage Deluxe Reverb could sound so nasty that I thought it would be cool to keep it that way. It wasn’t. There are no edits in this song and no fade out so when you hear me humming to find my next note, and plucking my guitar where I shouldn’t, you’ll know why.

November 26, 2006

OK people here it is, the new record: “Posthumously, The Formula Kid”.

We are making this available in three formats to appeal to the varying demand for audio quality: Good (128kbps mp3), Better (256kbps mp3), and Best (wav – CD audio). Of course we recommend the wav files because they are what you would get on the CD but the file sizes on these suckers are huge (between 22MB and 42MB) so you’ll need a bit of patience with the download times.

Here is the recommended song order but mix and match as you see fit. Email your cover artwork to info at the formula kid dot com and I’ll post it.

Right click on the link and “Save Target As” if your browser chooses to stream the audio instead of download it.

All songs produced by J. Christopher Hughes and The Formula Kid except On Martyrdom: produced by Drew Johnson.

You Devil You recorded by J. Christopher Hughes at The Sonic Temple.
On Martyrdom recorded by Drew Johnson at Angstrom Sound.
All other songs recorded by J. Christopher Hughes (all the hard stuff), Drew Johnson, and Dino Nicastro at our rehearsal space, Angstrom Sound, and Dino’s house.

You Devil You mixed by J. Christopher Hughes at The Sonic Temple.
All other songs mixed by Drew Johnson at Angstrom Sound.

Steve Nowels played Bass, Mandolin, and Cello on You Devil YouTracy sang the Background Vocals on Home

The Formula Kid would like to say a huge thanks to J. Christopher Hughes for all the time he dedicated to this project and for his inspiration. Without his encouragement and belief in this band this project may very well never have happened.

As soon as I get some time I will add all of these tunes to our “Audio” page but it’s just going to have to live here for the time being.

November 20, 2006

I hope to have the new record posted before Thanksgiving. We’ve run into a couple of hiccups in the last week or so but we hope to have them resolved shortly. J. Christopher Hughes has the last song to go on the record in his possession and he’s been in Nashville recording an album from dusk ’til dawn for the last couple of weeks. He was kind enough to do a fancy little file transfer of the tune but there was a little mix-up in transit but it’s on its way I promise.

Dino and I have been furiously trying to come up with a title for the new record. Naming a record is only slightly less cumbersome than naming a band. It’s probably going to be something along the lines of “Posthumously, The Formula Kid”. I remember how convinced I was that “Invention of the Wheel” should have been called “Grandma and the Glue Factory”. I still haven’t gotten over that one.

Have you ever taken one of those email-this-goofy-questionnaire-to-all-your-friends surveys? The ones that ask stuff like: Britney or Christina? Fold or bunch? What is your most embarrassing habit besides booger eating? Yeah me either but I was thinking about those things the other night as I was watching The Lawrence Welk Show. If those surveys ever asked “What are some T.V. shows that you watch but are embarrassed to admit to?” I would have two answers: The Lawrence Welk Show and Mind Freak. Needless to say I’m infinitely more humiliated by the fact that I’m fascinated with Mind Freak. Get off me, I dig magic…and narcissistic pretty-boys with high cheekbones and Jovi-hair.

October 9, 2006

I just uploaded “Dog and Pony Show” and “Outta Sight Shake” to our My Space page if you want to have a listen. We are very aware that the way My Space encodes songs sounds absolutely dreadful. That’s sort of the point. These mixes are pretty much done as far as I can tell but we don’t want to go handing them out until we are sure they’re absolutely right. So any changes we make will probably be subtle and you won’t know the difference anyway after hearing how horrible they sound on My Space. As I’m writing this “Outta Sight Shake” still hasn’t shown up on our page yet but by the time anyone reads this it should be there.

October 3, 2006

Yeah I know this is sorta old news to some of you but whatever. Gustave is a dad. Sophia Simone Gustave was born on my birthday (September 26) which I have no doubt was meticulously planned by Chris. I’m flattered. She’s almost as cute as me. Check her out.

For those of you who don’t know, Chris Gustave did the photography and artwork for the Drew Johnson Band album and was the brains behind The Six Comforts project we (and many other St. Louis bands) were involved in. Gustave is a genius in the truest sense of the word. I personally know no others. It was/is an honor to have him as a friend and fan. Chris and I have over the years spent many, many late nights discussing music, religion, politics, art, etc. I miss those days. I don’t miss the hangovers. Hanging out with Chris was like living a real life On The Road. Some of these pictures make me think that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs all had to be in the room there somewhere.

September 25, 2006

If you are interested in buying Dino a Birthday gift, he plays Ayotte drums. You may consider shopping around for the best financing option. If Dino plays it, I can’t afford it. I didn’t get him anything so if you could sign my name to the card I’d appreciate it.

Dino, Gina, and Marco came over yesterday afternoon and we grilled some pork steaks and raised our cholesterol to celebrate his and my Birthdays. Mine is tomorrow. Our families hadn’t hung out in a long time so that made for a cool afternoon. We listened to and critiqued some of the mixes I’ve been working on. We’ve got five of the eight songs to a place where they’re at least relatively close to being finished. I gave CDs to Mike and Nate the other night so I’m waiting to hear back from them with their input before I start making any changes. It’s coming along slowly but surely.

Last Thursday night Dino, Mike, Nate, and I played a gig along with Josh Kohn on guitar and Steve Bunck on drums. This was the first time since I left the band that the four of us had been on stage together…or even in the same room together for that matter. We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who came out that night. The place was packed. That’s always nice.

I’ll keep everyone posted on how the mixing is coming along as soon as there’s more to tell. In the mean time keep Angel and Riley in your prayers. The noise around here is getting ridiculous.

August 23, 2006

For the past couple of days I’ve been going through all of my recordings and getting them organized and backed up. It’s been pretty interesting because I found a bunch of stuff that I had totally forgotten about. So if you’re as interested in me as I am, you’ll want to check this stuff out because some of it sounds really bad. Really bad!

These first couple of mp3s are from the George Harrison Tribute the Drew Johnson Band played in. This is NOT the stuff that sounds really bad. Our version of Here Comes the Sun has been on the site for a long time but these you haven’t heard yet. The first one is Savoy Truffle from the White Album. It took the sound man a while to figure out that this wasn’t a trumpet solo with band accompaniment but it’s still pretty cool.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you’ll remember that the song Twenty Miles from Waterloo has been a point of soreness for us. I have so many demos of this song it’s ridiculous. Here is one of them. It’s all acoustic and very short.

Next is an experiment with the vocals for To Mother from Her Son. In the original demo I didn’t have any lyrics so it’s all just la la nah nah stuff. The vocals work in a sort of faux round. I thought that sounded extremely cool (still do) so once I had lyrics I had to figure out how to make that work. This demo is me trying. You’ll quickly see why the idea of a round was canned after the lyrics were added.

This next one I had forgotten about even though it’s only a few months old. It’s another nah-nah-hmm-hmm-make-up-the-words-as-you-go thing. At the beginning I’m telling myself the notes of the fancy chord so I can find it later.